The present invention concerns an apparatus and method for burning waste material, and more particularly concerns an apparatus and method adapted to bum combustible and semicombustible trash and the like.
Modern civilizations generate a tremendous amount of rubbish and trash, which will be referred to herein as waste products. The waste products come from a variety of industrial and domestic sources, and usually comprise a wide variety of materials. Land filling these waste products is becoming increasingly expensive and also is now considered environmentally undesirable. Incineration and/or burning the waste materials is an attractive alternative since it can be done relatively close to the source of the waste material. Further, the energy to incinerate can come in part from the waste material itself. However, there are problems with incineration and/or burning of waste materials.
A major problem is that the waste materials collected in volume are very non-uniform, especially those collected at public collection centers, such that there is a great variation in properties of the waste product such as combustibility, BTU content, percent of uncombustible matter, and potential resultant pollutants from the burning/incineration process. Existing municipal incineration facilities have attempted to overcome the problems of incinerating/burning the inconsistent waste material by addition of fuel, additives and/or externally supplied heat to the burning process. Also, many facilities sort waste material before feeding it into the incinerator. However, sorting input waste material is expensive and messy. Further, large and expensive emission control systems capable of handling wide variations in emissions must still be used since, in known municipal incineration facilities for waste materials, the burning process varies greatly in temperature, in heat generation and in pollutant types and quantities that are generated.
Thus, an apparatus for and method of decomposing and/or burning waste materials of varying quality and content solving the aforementioned problems is desired that is efficient, environmentally acceptable, continuous, and readily controllable.